Everyone at Excelisys loves to hear that rhetorical question asked: “Woah! You can do THAT in FileMaker?” Oh yeah, you can. Well this is one of those moments, and we just posted a demo file and white paper about it up on our Excelisys web site.

http://www.excelisys.com/tips-tricks-filemaker-downloads.php

With the new script triggers introduced in the recently released FileMaker Pro 10, we all can now deliver a richer user experience to our customers – one that incorporates a familiar and elegant interface mechanism: drag-and-drop.

The new demo file we’ve posted is fully unlocked, requires FileMaker Pro 10, and includes three interface examples of the drag-and-drop technique. There is also an embedded PDF white paper that further explains how the whole thing is built, with sample code.

The most obvious use is sorting. Let’s say you’re in a band and you’re trying to organize a set list. Just drag the song titles into the order you want, or change it up again just by dragging. How long have we wanted this feature?

Another great use is building a list. Let’s say you’re managing the receiving dock in a warehouse and you have two lists: the one on the left shows four items ordered on a PO, while the list on the right is blank but will include the items you are receiving. Today you only received one item, so you drag that item from the list on the left into the list on the right. Easy, right?

But here’s yet another great example: nesting in a hierarchical interface. We’ve previously posted a tip on how to build a hierarchical interface, so here’s how to – BAM! – kick it up a notch. Let’s say you have an outline for a presentation, and you decide to move some of your subtopics to another parent topic. By just dragging the subtopic to another topic in the list, you have rearranged your outline – any nested subtopics in the item you moved are automatically moved with it, just as you’d expect.

And that’s when it hits you…   THIS is FileMaker???

These great techniques, examples and white papers are brought to you (once again) by eX-Team Senior Developer Andrew Persons.

Can you think of any other great drag-and-drop example ideas? Leave us a comment and tell us about it, and if applicable let us know how this technique helped you in your projects.